because she was at risk for heart trouble and osteoporosis—a small-boned blue-eyed blonde who'd smoked for twenty years before giving it up in med school. In reality, without the compensation of children, she'd clung to the illusion of relative youth with the artificial extension of middle age. It was okay to be old, as long as she didn't look it. All in all, she was pleased with what she saw.
And so she forced herself to imagine Emilio's eyes on her, to work through in thought any conceivable scenario in which he could come to her as she was now. She did not look away from the mirror: an act of will.
At last she turned from her image, done with the exercise, and ran the shower. A son-in-law, she thought as the water beat down on her shoulders. A Sagadese son-in-law, with whom an old woman could flirt and joke outrageously across a clear generational distance. That came close to the need she felt. Anthropology to the rescue, after all these years.
Then she stopped moving and wondered what Emilio needed. Son, then, she thought. Like a son.
She turned off the water and stepped out onto the rug, dried herself, and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Occupied with morning rituals, she nearly forgot the night's distress. But before Anne left the bathroom, she took one last look at herself in the mirror. Not bad for an old bat, she thought briskly, and startled George by grabbing his ass when she passed him in the hallway.
The house was empty when Emilio awoke. He lay quietly for a long while, getting his bearings, remembering how he came to be in this bed. Finally, the dull pounding in his head convinced him he'd feel better upright. Using his arms and stomach muscles, trying to keep his chest still, he sat. And then stood, holding on to the headboard.
There was a bathrobe on the chair next to his bed, with a new toothbrush stuck prominently in the pocket, where he'd be sure to see it. His clothes had been cleaned and were stacked, folded, on a bureau. There was a bottle of tablets sitting on the nightstand with a note from Anne. 'Two when you wake up. Two before bed. They won't make you groggy. There's coffee in the kitchen.' He wondered briefly what
Standing in the bathroom, he decided against a shower, not sure what to do about the tape holding his rib in. He cleaned up as best he could and stared blankly at his reflection, noting the flamboyant colors and the swelling. A sudden wave of panic overcame him as he wondered what day and time it was, afraid it was Sunday and that his small congregation had been let down by his failure to appear. No, he remembered. It must be Saturday. Young Felipe Reyes would have been the only one at the chapel, ready to serve. He laughed, anticipating the fantastic Latin dressing down he was in for from Felipe, but the pain in his chest stopped him cold and he realized that raising the Host was going to be a real struggle the next day. He remembered Anne's voice the night before. 'You can offer up your suffering tomorrow.' She was being sarcastic, but she understood.
He dressed slowly. In the kitchen, Anne and George had left fresh bread and oranges for him. He was still a little sick to his stomach, so he took only a cup of black coffee, which helped the headache.
It was about two in the afternoon when he was ready to leave. Emilio permitted himself one heartfelt obscenity and steeled himself for a very public walk back to his little apartment, down near the beach.
He gave a different story to each person who stopped him, the explanations becoming funnier and more extravagantly improbable as he worked his way home. People who'd never spoken to him before now laughed at his replies and shyly offered help. The kids rallied and ran errands for him, bringing offers of food from their mothers. Felipe was jealous.
He was able to use only his left arm to raise the consecrated bread and wine, but Mass the next morning was the best attended since he'd returned to Puerto Rico. Even Anne came.
8
ARECIBO:
MAY 2019
That spring, Jimmy Quinn's written proposal to Dr. Yanoguchi was routed through the ISAS channels, discussed and approved. Sofia Mendes was hired by arrangement with her broker, who agreed to the competitive aspect of the proposition. Mendes herself laid out crystalline criteria for how success or failure would be judged. There was a period of negotiation but in the end, ISAS accepted her terms. If she won, her broker was to receive three times her normal fee, enough to clear her debt. If she lost, ISAS could accept the program with its limitations known, but pay nothing. Her broker could then legally extend her contract for treble the time it took her to do the ISAS project. Jimmy was delighted.
Sofia Mendes, wrapping up her Singapore project in late April and preparing for the ISAS job, was not delighted. She maintained a cold neutrality, concentrating on what was, blocking out what might be. She had survived because, by heritage and experience, she knew how to see reality unclouded by emotion. It was a talent that had served her family well for centuries.
Before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the ancient Mendes were bankers, financiers to royalty. Hounded out of Iberia, they were welcomed by the Ottoman Empire, which gladly accepted the Sephardic merchants and astronomers, physicians and poets, archivists, mathematicians, interpreters and diplomats, the philosophers and the bankers like the Mendes, whom their Catholic majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, drove from Spain. The Sephardim quickly became the most productive and energetic people in the empire, their society adorned at the top by notables who served successive sultans, as their forebears had served in Spanish courts. The culture that gave the world the Talmud and the towering physician-philosopher Maimonides once again became influential and respected.
But things change. The Ottoman Empire became merely Turkey. The Mendes were represented in the twentieth century by quiet, accomplished people who did not speak of their historic glory to outsiders but did not let their children forget those days either. They wasted no time mourning the past; they did their best in the circumstances in which they found themselves, and their best was commonly superb. In that, Sofia was their heir. The money and influence were gone; the pride and clearheadedness and intelligence were not.
When Istanbul began tearing itself to rubble in the insanity that grew out of the Second Kurdish War, Sofia Mendes was thirteen. Her mother, a musician, was dead before Sofia's fourteenth birthday: a random mortar shell in the afternoon. Within weeks, her father, an economist, was missing, probably dead as well; he went to find food and never came back to the remains of their home. Her childhood, which had been books and music and love and learning, was finished. There was no way out of the city, sealed off by U.N. troops, left to devour itself in isolation. She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sephardic tradition, she had been since the age of twelve and a half
Her clients were mostly half-grown boys crazed with violence and men who might have been decent husbands and good fathers once but who were now militiamen in a hundred vicious factions, all that remained of the brilliant cosmopolitan society that had once gloried in its diversity, as had San Francisco, Sarajevo, Beirut. She learned to get the money or the food first and she learned to take her mind elsewhere when her body was used. She learned that mortal fear resolves into lethal anger, that the men who cried in her arms were likely to try killing her before they left, and she learned to use a knife. She learned what everyone learns in war. Living through it is all that matters.
The Frenchman picked her from the line of girls at the corner because even after a year and a half on the streets, she was still beautiful. Jean-Claude Jaubert was always attracted by contrasts: in this case, the pale skin and the black hair, the well-marked brows; the aristocratic carriage and the dirty schoolgirl uniform; youth and experience. He had money, and there were still things to be had in Istanbul if you could pay. He insisted on dressing her properly, providing a hotel room with running water, where she could bathe, and a meal, which she did not bolt down despite evident hunger. She accepted all this and what came after, without gratitude or shame. He found her a second time and afterward, at dinner, they discussed the war, the outside world and Jaubert's business.
'I am a futures broker,' he told her, leaning back from the table and settling his stomach over his belt. 'I represent a group of investors who sponsor promising young people in difficult circumstances.'
